To Pimp a Mockingbird: A Lesson Plan
Literacy, you know firsthand, is a tool, is a motivator, is the beat of education.
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Posts Tagged: Harper Lee
What to Read When Trying to Figure Out Who You Are
Terry H. Watkins shares a list of books to celebrate her novel, DARLING GIRL.
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What to Read When You Want to Read an “Uncomfortable” Book
Authors whose works have been challenged or banned give recommendations on other “uncomfortable” books that will make you a better person for having read them.
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What to Read When Everyone Is Celebrating Dads
Whether you are celebrating your father or cursing his name this Father’s Day, here’s a list of very good books about fathers from writers we love.
...moreThe Artist as Public Object
Is it because rather than keeping us almost entirely out of the empty room, as Lee did, Ocean chose to let us in through hints and ephemera? And more broadly, what are we owed by an artist whom we profess to love? For the Atlantic, Eve L. Ewing examines the careers and output of Harper Lee […]
...moreHarper Lee’s Estate Kills Low Cost Edition
The estate of Harper Lee will no longer allow the publication of the mass market paperback edition of To Kill a Mockingbird. Lee’s estate is expected to earn higher royalties from the trade paperback, which sold 22,554 copies so far this year compared to the 55,367 copies of the mass market paperbacks. While its unclear […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Cote Smith
Cote Smith talks about his debut novel, Hurt People, growing up in a prison town, using rejection as motivation, and brotherly love.
...moreRe-Rethinking Harper Lee
At Lit Hub, Kate Jenkins discusses Southern literature’s clumsy history in dealing with race, and theorizes that, in light of Go Set A Watchman, Harper Lee may have actually been much more ahead of her time than we thought: Did Harper Lee ever consider Atticus a hero? Pre-Go Set a Watchman criticisms of Atticus generally […]
...moreComing of Age
The publication of Go Set a Watchman may have cast Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird in a new light, but the high school classic and its author will forever occupy an essential spot in the American literary canon. Michiko Kakutani remembers Lee’s work for the Times: Ms. Lee’s two novels both concern the loss […]
...moreHarper Lee’s Life and Work
Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, passed away on Friday. William Grimes remembers her life and work for the New York Times: Looking back on her childhood as a precocious tomboy, Scout, the narrator, evokes the sultry summers and simple pleasures of an ordinary small town in Alabama. At a time when Southern fiction inclined toward […]
...moreAaron Sorkin’s Mockingbird
In an announcement that is equal parts completely expected and narrow-eyes-tilted-head inducing, Aaron Sorkin will adapt Harper Lee’s beloved classic To Kill a Mockingbird for the stage, to be directed by Barlett Sher. Hopefully without Sorkinisms.
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Jonathan Travelstead
I try to…consider the writing process as seriously as I do entering a house with black smoke puffing from its eaves.
...moreWhat Could Have Been
For the New York Times, Alexandra Alter explores how Truman Capote and Harper Lee’s childhood friendship influenced their work, and wonders if the famous duo’s careers would have developed differently if their relationship wasn’t “strained by bitterness and rivalry.”
...moreGo Refund a Watchman
After all of the hype and controversy surrounding Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, some readers found themselves a little bit disappointed when they read the actual book. One book store in Michigan has started offering refunds for regretful readers. NPR has the full story.
...moreDan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
(Dan Weiss is out on tour with his band The Yellow Dress. He’ll be back on August 3rd.) It’s dubious whether these parents read either book. It’s not personal, it’s just privileged. Fact-checking the infamous nail salon story. Being bored in literature. A professor warns students away from the University of Wisconsin. Roxane Gay on the […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Joshua Mohr and Janis Cooke Newman
Authors Joshua Mohr and Janis Cooke Newman talk with one another about their new novels, All This Life and A Master Plan for Rescue, respectively.
...moreComplements to the Canon
Vann R. Newkirk II (@fivefifths) writes for Seven Scribes on the experience of discovering novels by black writers to act as a necessary complement to reading Harper Lee’s reductive portrayals of race in Mockingbird and Watchman: These books, this canon, represented the exact opposite of what To Kill a Mockingbird meant. They were freedom. They were […]
...moreThe Editor Who Shaped Mockingbird
We’ll never know how Harper Lee’s editor, Therese von Hohoff Torrey, would have felt about the publication of Go Set A Watchman, because she died in 1974. But probably, she wouldn’t be excited about it: As Ms. Hohoff saw it, the manuscript was by no means fit for publication. It was, as she described it, “more […]
...moreLee’s “Parent Novel” Completes Manuscript Family
According to a recent account by Harper Lee’s lawyer, the famed author wrote a third manuscript that may be a “parent novel” that “bridges” To Kill A Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman together. The manuscript was discovered in Lee’s safe-deposit box, and is currently being examined by experts.
...moreTo Talk To a Mockingbird
In 1978, while writing Gregory Peck’s biography, Michael Freedman had the privilege of talking on the phone with Harper Lee, resulting in possibly the only interview the author ever gave. Now, he writes about their conversation over at the Guardian: I remember very well how the rendezvous was arranged. We were sitting in his big rustic […]
...moreDan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
(Dan Weiss is out on tour with his band The Yellow Dress. He’ll be back on August 3rd.) In the best news ever for someone yet to be determined, J.K. Rowling has announced an open casting call for her Harry Potter spin-off. The Boy Scouts of America have (finally) unanimously approved a resolution allowing gay adults to […]
...moreThe Gods of Southern Gothic
At the Guardian, author M.O. Walsh tries to account for the global popularity of southern gothic literature. While he attributes much of southern gothic literature’s success to a tradition of oral storytelling, he also suggests that it is the southern novelist’s ability to treat the “grotesque” with empathy that helps to create memorable characters: Show me […]
...moreLeave Harper Alone
The mysterious buzz surrounding the upcoming release of Harper Lee’s second novel, Go Set a Watchman, has had readers and journalists speculating about the elderly author’s mental capabilities in a manner often invasive and disrespectful. Lee answered a particularly nosy inquiry with a curt “go away,” concisely expressing how the rest of us have felt […]
...moreHarper Lee Debate Rages On
Since the announcement of Harper Lee’s forthcoming novel Go Set a Watchman, residents of Lee’s hometown, Monroeville, Alabama, along with the general public, have questioned whether or not publishers are taking advantage of the eighty-eight year old author. Recently, however, Lee’s lawyer Tonja Carter insists that the author is “lucid.” [Lee] is a very strong, independent, and wise […]
...moreHarper Schmarper, It’s Kundera We Want
Sure, everyone is jazzed about the new Harper Lee book (except for those of us who are worried). But here is a book we can all get behind—a new Milan Kundera novel to be translated to English this summer: Faber described the new book as a “wryly comic yet deeply serious glance at the ultimate insignificance […]
...moreQuestioning Harper Lee’s Editor Answers
Here’s an author who has staunchly refused interviews and publicity since 1960, who hasn’t breathed a word about her interest in publishing another book to either family or friends, but who is suddenly fine with releasing her decades-old Mockingbird prequel, despite the fact that it doesn’t sound like anyone at her publisher has actually been […]
...moreA Sequel, Five Decades Later
Harper Lee is set to publish a sequel to her Pulitzer-winning To Kill a Mockingbird. Lee’s only novel has sold more than 30 million copies and earns almost $4 million a year. Lee’s poor health, combined with more than five decades of literary silence, leads Modern Notion to question the motivation to suddenly publish a […]
...moreBoo Radley, Social Media Star
Last Monday, Harper Lee brought an end to what CNN has called “a glaring holdout in the digital library of literary masterpieces,” and the news has social media buzzing with fans chomping at the bit. Lee has finally agreed to release an electronic copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. “I’m still old-fashioned. I love dusty […]
...moreBut Is It A Sin to Kill Her Agent?
In November, we posted a link to a story about To Kill a Mockingbird’s Harper Lee suing her hometown museum. But it turns out the aging author has an even bigger fish to fry in the courtroom: her literary agent who “duped” her into signing over the copyright to her Pulitzer Prize–winning novel. As the LA Times […]
...moreA Different Kind of Courtroom Battle for Harper Lee
Well, this is all rather awkward: Harper Lee, who is now 87 and in an assisted-living facility, is suing the gift shop of a museum in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, for trademark infringement. The museum, “built around a refurbished version of the courtroom” from To Kill A Mockingbird, already got rid of gift-shop items like “Calpurnia’s […]
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